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Spinny Character Outline

Written by Adam Green on Sunday the 27th of November 2011

Spinny'neuro-boy' Jones was conceived when a Navaho Indian inseminated a mathsteacher during a thunderstorm in a Dakota shopping mall car park. On his mother's side, genetic contributionscame from Pythagoras, Robert Boyle and Alfred Laplace. His father's ancestorsincluded Sitting Buffalo, Tree Leaf and Kai Star. From Fourth Century Taiwaneseastronomers to Shiite Arab's and Swiss bank clerks to Russian aristocrats, hisinheritance drew its sources from the cream of our ancestors. If Theo was a neurotic outsider makingcross-referenced notes on the root, manifestation and resolution of the fire ofBeing, then Spinny 'neuro-boy' Jones was the sulphurous smell of the match thatwas flicked in the first place.

His lungs were woven out of ancient hempspeckled with vanilla dots, and his kidneys were sand-beans. Instead oftesticles he had two Mayan conkers and his blood was cranberry wine whippedwith petroleum. Sharp green eyes andtorn dungarees covered in paint, he wore red-tinted sun-glasses with fair hairgnarled into short dreadlocks. He lived in the same baggy t-shirt and his ashenfinger-tips were hard while his stubble gave him a sagely edge as he walkedsideways in smoke forlorn trainers - a red-eyed prophet. His thoughts were haphazard and crashing instrange. In their chaotic and drunken waltz, they came across unusual ideas.Stasis was flipped and a multi-coloured cloudiness filled his head. It was rapture and church bells but thenfingernails down blackboards and out of tune radio frequencies.

He hada curious brain which could not tell differences between space and objects orup and down. Everything jumbled together and swapped over at random in atranscendental dodgem carnival. He was unable to tie his shoelaces, couldhardly change his clothes and often ate rain thinking it was lettuce. At theage of eleven, the unifying power of science drew him in, since it too seemedto pierce beyond distinctions and touch oneness. In three hundred years, themonochrome, split cosmos of a single world under the governance of a distantGod had been replaced by a fused universe wild and giddy, riddled with curvedspace, squashed time and sexy, whimsical quarks. All this was made possible bythe manuscripts and formulas of Copernicus and Einstein, Newton and Heisenberg. Spinny wanted to jointhat shining parade, so he left home and embarked on the world with a notepad. Hehad a crack at physics, dabbled with biology and worked in various areas of chemistry,but it was when he came into contact with the journals of Paracelsus in a skipin Ohio thathe decided to become an alchemist. A bitold school and retro, but science proper had forgotten that magic dream of unitythat fuelled Newtonand Einstein and was too narrow.

After threemonths, his labours began to pay off. Triumphs included: turningcarrot-shavings into toothpaste, milk into pigeon crap and pencil-lead intovitamin c. Later, he transformed a tennis racket into a tennis ball, and astale muffin into Elton John. Now it wastime for gold, but it proved elusive. Skimming through more mainstream texts, Spinny realised that no mancould ever have transformed metals into gold. They were only surface changes or colour dyes. He was puzzled. If no-one created gold, why did alchemistsexperience ecstasy? He came to theconclusion that it is not gold that is important, but the rush of purity in thesoul - posing the alchemists work on wholly psychic grounds. He decided tocombine the thoughts of Carl Jung and Paracelsus like one might combineboysenberry with mango - for the brain is a micro-cosmic smoothie of theuniversal whole. A piercing thought ofwisdom shares its nature with zippy starlight. Melancholy is weaved frommoonshine. The swerve of young love is the formation of new galaxies and the wheezeof the aged is the entropy of dying suns. He decided to become aneuro-alchemist, a bio-electrician of the psyche - pricking the spirit with theneedle of matter.

He studiedplant extracts and their impact on synapses; the neurons[1] as riverbeds and consciousness as the combination of psychic energy and tree sap. If moods are the net tapestry of synapticconnections, then the melting of those connections which drain élan would freethe self. His plan was simple. He would transmute human consciousness into goldvia the natural kingdom. So which herbalcompound would snip the weeds of anxiety riddling the global brain and nudge usback onto a more sustainable direction? He would work through the evenings and sleep in the days, going onmonth-long benders fuelled with magic mushrooms and gin so that hisrelationship with the universe could be one of playfulness instead ofretaliation. He began buildingpsycho-tropic drugs to expose the psyche to the unconscious forces which driveit. By disturbing surface ego in order to mellow the stiffness of the adultmind, he hoped to infuse the population of the western world with a reverence andlight that has been lost after a hundred and fifty years of industry.

[1] Do not be frightenedby the technical terminology. A neuron is basically just a small thin thing.Synapses are slightly smaller things at the end of them.